Chimp

Melvin stepped out of the white armored car, carrying one of the deliveries, and was gunned down immediately. He only had time to say, “Spthutt–! Whaduhhh—!!” before his various body parts rained down across the concrete, creating an image on the sidewalk resembling a Rorschach test. The forensics guys looked at the mess. “I think it looks like two boobies and that’s like a kitty-cat’s face- see that’s the ears and that’s the whiskers,” one said.“No,” said the other. “I see a witch leaning over a cauldron. See, there’s the pointy hat, there’s the pot.”

“Oh, yeah! Totally,” the other guy answered. The guy cleaning the blood off the white truck looked down at them. “You guys are sick.”

“Why, what do you see it as?” one asked. They cracked themselves up, going on poking the chunks with their pointed sticks. But then a sniper opened fire and their bodies exploded too, adding to the bloody pile of flesh. The cops pulled their guns and took cover inside the building.

Reinforcements came but no one could figure out which building the shots were coming from and whenever someone would poke their head out it would get blown off. The cops began blasting messages on bullhorns, addressing the sniper in angry, fatherly, then even motherly tones. He didn’t show his face and the standoff went into the night with television crews and crowds cordoned off at what was thought to be a safe distance away.

Soon more shots erupted that took the whole television crew out and scattered the crowd in a bloody mess all over the street. This lead to more urgent admonitions from the bullhorn. A very brave priest stepped forward, waving the tiny cross attached to the chain around his neck, but of course he was gunned down too, blown into several pieces in fact, each landing with a distinct thud. The demands from the bullhorn didn’t even make sense anymore now, the police shouting so panicked and incoherent.

That’s when the attacker showed himself, bouncing down from one pile to another- a giant monkey with a sniper rifle. The SWAT marksmen were too confused to shoot for a second and when they came to their senses the monkey had already commandeered a police car and was smashing it through barricades. He got about half a block before the squad car was full of so many holes it had become a cloud of metallic dust.

When the smoke cleared, the SWAT team stepped out and poked around the dust pile for signs of the chimp. They found none. It appeared that he too had turned to dust, leaving more many questions and few answers.